AMD K9
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The term K9 represents a microarchitecture by AMD to replace the K8 chips, and has had various definitions.
Contents |
[edit] The unknown status
AMD has now confirmed K8L, a native quad core design with multiple IPC improvements, as its next generation core. Previous reports (dated 2004) quoted from AMD pointed out that AMD may move straight to the reported cancelled K10 Project to avoid confusion with dual core AMD K8. There is no further mentioning of any K9 product from anyone associated with AMD (as of October 2006). Some reports suggested that K9 was actually cancelled back in 2004. [citation needed]
[edit] Original K9 - eight issue
K9 appears originally to have been an ambitious 8 issue per clock cycle core redesign of the K7/K8. At one point, K9 was the Greyhound project at AMD, and was worked on by the K7 team beginning in February or March 2001, with tape-out revision A0 scheduled for 2003. The L1 instruction cache was said to hold decoded instructions, essentially the same thing as Intel's trace cache. Project delays meant work was put back, and rolled into the K10 project. The K10 project is also reported [1] to have been cancelled.
[edit] Naming
Some claim that the cancellation of the K nomenclature is likely an attempt by AMD to avoid ridicule caused by the similarities between "K9" and "canine", but this is only conjecture, considering K7 and K8 were only internal codenames for the processors that AMD marketed as the Athlon and the Athlon 64, respectively.
